Current Affairs and Policy Analysis

Trump’s threat to leave NATO was never real, but the shakedown worked, forcing European allies to hand over their cash to US arms manufacturers, the various components of the deep state coordinating with the administration to ensure a positive outcome for relevant stakeholders.

The current northern border is preserved. That is a huge win for Damascus. Turkey will be sending a substantial number of Syrian refugees back south of the border to areas not now populated by Kurds. This is a major plus for Erdogan.

Firms under foreign ownership see their profits and dividends flow overseas, their investment decisions taken to serve foreign interests, their assets stripped and risky long-term investments shut down to boost short-run profits and dividends; domestic investment in plant and machinery, in research and development, in skills training [...] are liable to be severely curtailed; we're flogging off of assets vital to our strategic national interest [...]; but, Lynn reassures us, the wave of takeovers that is likely in the months ahead ‘will keep the stock market buoyant’.

Donald Trump’s stance towards the Turkish intervention in northern Syria has some (stress some) resemblance to his predecessor Barack Obama’s position on Ukraine. Obama like Trump, saw a reasoned basis for limiting US military involvement in Syria.

Serious consideration should be given to laying the framework of a multilateral treaty in which the world's great powers commit to replacing their store of nuclear weapons with high-impact conventionals within a timeframe of, at most, twenty years.

The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.

The Intelligence Community claim that the DNC emails were taken via a Russian spearphising attack is a lie. All 35,813 DNC emails posted on Wikileaks are in a FAT format according to the metadata. This means the emails were downloaded onto a recordable media, such as a thumb drive.

Initial reports indicate that the forces of the Saudi-led coalition were lured into vulnerable positions and then, through a pincer movement conducted quickly within Saudi territory, the Houthis surrounded the town of Najran and its outskirts and got the better of three Saudi brigades numbering in the thousands and including dozens of senior officers as well as numerous combat vehicles.

That leaves me with the alternative explanation--Smolenkov is a propaganda prop and is being trotted out by Brennan to try to provide public pressure to prevent the disclosure of intelligence that will show that the CIA and the NSA were coordinating and operating with British intelligence to entrap and smear Donald Trump and members of his campaign.

If the most successful American public universities are any guide, when it comes to international students, 10% adds diversity to the student body, 15% is the maximum reasonable level, and 20% represents internationalisation gone wild. In Australia, the average level of international students across the entire university system is 26.7%. By any reasonable standard, that’s too high.

Throughout the day on Sunday there were various protests and scenes of disruption, with Hong Kong police at times looking embattled, at times appearing indiscriminate in their response, at others showing restraint in the face of intimidation.

It seems increasingly likely that the next leader of the Conservatives, and UK Prime Minister, will be Boris Johnson. On the face of it, this looks like good news for supporters of Brexit given Johnson’s record on this issue and his recent statement that the UK will leave the EU by October 31 ‘do or die’. Yet given the history of the last two years, during which the genuine Brexit envisaged at Lancaster House was watered down to the Brexit in-name-only of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement (WA), Brexit supporters should avoid euphoria and be very cautious. There were key moments…

Dr. Toshi Yoshihara is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining CSBA, he held the John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies and was an affiliate member of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College, where he taught strategy for ten years. He is the co-author of Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy, Indian Naval Strategy in the Twenty-first Century andChinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan. He is also co-editor of Strategy in the Second…

This is the transcript of Lecture at the Heritage Foundation, “Brexit and the US-UK Defense Relationship” given by Professor Gwythian Prins on 1 May 2019. A summary is on the Briefings for Brexit blog page. Ted, colleagues at Heritage, distinguished ladies and gentlemen. I am honoured and grateful for the hospitality of your platform this afternoon so that I can share with you some insights into the least well discussed and yet in many ways the most dangerous aspect of the strategies by which Mrs May and her close advisers have failed to execute the instruction that I and 17.4 million fellow…

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